Critics Question Overdue Plan to Track Cancer and Pollution

It was an audacious plan standing uneasily at the intersection of cancer science and cancer politics: to explore possible links between pollution and cancer by mapping every neighborhood in New York State, showing cancer cases and sources of water, ground or air contamination. Nothing like it had ever been attempted.

Last year, the Legislature allocated $1 million for the effort, but Gov. George E. Pataki vetoed it. The Governor said the project could be accomplished with existing funds, and, mindful of the powerful cancer survivors' lobby, he promised that the State Health Department would proceed with the project. The veto, however, meant that it was no longer a legislative mandate; it was entirely in his administration's control.

Nine months after the veto, the project has strayed far from what the Legislature intended. The Pataki administration intends, at least at the start, to map cancers only on a county-by-county level, though that information is already public and researchers say it has little scientific value. Administration officials say they are not sure whether the first round of maps will include any information on contaminants, which legislators and cancer survivors say is the whole point of the project.

The Health Department says it will eventually create truly local maps, including environmental data, but it cannot say when.

Perhaps most disturbing to advocates of the project is that it has become clear that maps of any kind are years away, even though administration officials promised last year that preliminary maps would be published within months.

Cancer survivors' groups, particularly those on Long Island, and environmentalists keenly want to see the maps to validate long-held suspicions that there are higher-than-expected concentrations of similar cancers in one discrete area -- so-called cancer clusters -- that can be traced to landfills, factories or water wells.

But the scientific establishment has largely dismissed the notion that cancer clusters can be traceable to environmental causes. And corporations that own polluted sites, and some real estate interests, have quietly lobbied against the project, fearing the liability it could mean for them.

The administration contends that it must proceed cautiously to produce the best possible data, and some of its independent scientific advisers agree. It also asserts that if it publishes maps without great care and a heavy layer of interpretation, it risks alarming or confusing the public.

The administration's critics counter that the state already has the raw data to do a basic version of the maps in weeks or months and that more nuanced ones could come later. They say the public has a right to see where cancer ''hot spots'' coincide with pollution. Researchers would then know where to look for more finely honed data, the critics say, giving a head start to establishing environmental causes for a disease that kills 40,000 New Yorkers a year.

''What we're getting instead of a cancer map is an empty and misleading effort that does nothing to place the facts before the people of the state,'' said Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, chairman of the Environmental Conservation Committee. He was a prime sponsor of the mapping bill that the Governor vetoed and is one of more than a dozen Assembly members who wrote last week to the Health Department, expressing concern at the project's direction.

Zenia Mucha, Mr. Pataki's communications director, said: ''The Department of Health has to do what they think is the best scientific study they can do. We're not going to allow political considerations or political pressure to dictate how to do a scientific study.''

The cancer map was first proposed by cancer survivors on Long Island's eastern end, where breast cancer and other cancers are more prevalent than statewide or nationwide. Those advocates had charted suspected cancer clusters in their own villages, by ZIP code, by type of cancer and by proximity to hazardous-waste sites, an exercise they hoped to duplicate across New York.

Like these amateurs, private researchers and government agencies have occasionally done local cancer mapping where there was already suspicion of a cluster, but no one has ever attempted a detailed cancer map of a state.

There seems no doubt that some form of statewide maps could be produced in short order. The Health Department has a cancer registry, which collects the name, address and type of cancer for every New Yorker found to have the disease or determined by autopsy to have had it. The department uses the data to publish annual reports on cancer incidence.

The state also knows the locations of 2,000 toxic-waste sites, 400 industrial sites it says are responsible for 95 percent of toxic releases into the environment, every landfill and other pollution sources. ''The cancer data already exist and the environmental factor data already exist,'' Mr. Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat, said. ''What the Legislature intended was that the two be overlaid in the quickest responsible fashion.''

Last spring, Dr. Barbara DeBuono, then the State Health Commissioner, wrote to cancer survivors' groups, saying preliminary maps were just months away. But members of the department's advisory committee on the project, which met for the first time in December, say they were told that the first maps were probably two years away, a timetable that department officials privately confirmed.

The first maps, department officials say, will show cancer rates by county. The department already publishes annual reports with county-level data, so such maps would simply repackage the same information.

''That tabular data exist, but it is not easy for the lay person to read,'' said Kristine A. Smith, a department spokeswoman. ''A graphic representation of information is much more understandable.''

But members of the department's own advisory committee on the project question whether there is a point to county-level maps. ''If the information is already published, I'm not sure why you'd publish it again in a different form,'' said Lorraine Pace of West Islip, N.Y., a committee member and breast cancer survivor. She is a cancer educator at University Hospital at Stony Brook and co-president of Breast Cancer Help, a survivors' group.

Scientists on the advisory committee say that even if county-level maps could supply new data, they would be of little use because cancer clusters would occur on a much smaller level, in villages, neighborhoods, even individual blocks.

State officials say that in rural areas, more detailed maps could violate patients' privacy, making it plain to neighbors, for instance, who in a particular ZIP code has a particular kind of cancer. But some advocates say that concern is misplaced, particularly with more common kinds of cancer.

The geographical information on cancer patients is admittedly imperfect. It shows where they lived when their cancer was diagnosed or when they died. Experts say it would be better to know how long the patients had lived at those addresses, their previous addresses and their workplaces. Survivors' groups have long pressed the state to include that information in the registry, to no avail.

''What they have is certainly a very good start for pointing where researchers should look,'' said Dr. J. R. Nuckols, associate professor of environmental health at Colorado State University and director of the university's Environmental Health Advanced Systems Laboratory. ''And then, in those places, you would need to do some very intensive field-level epidemiological legwork.''

Some advisory committee members say Health Department officials told them in December that the initial maps, at least, would contain no data on environmental hazards.

''That defeats the whole purpose of mapping,'' said Judith Enck, environmental analyst at the New York Public Interest Research Group.

Ms. Smith said the department had not yet decided whether to include pollution data in the first maps. She said that eventually, ''we intend to do risk factors mapping,'' but that she did not know when that might be.

When asked why environmental factors would be left out, she said, ''We have a responsibility to give people information that's as clear and understandable as possible.''

Advisory committee members say the department is extremely reluctant to indicate any connection between polluters and cancer.

''They're struggling with developing the methodology, and they're very concerned about what will be represented as a link between cancers and environmental factors,'' said Sarah Meyland, a panel member and executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment.

But the map was never intended to establish such a link; scientists say it cannot establish a link. That can only be done by intensive field work, including chemical and biological testing. The map, they say, is only meant to show where to look.

Like some other scientists on the panel, she said she was comfortable with the department's approach, which reflects research scientists' habit of publishing findings only after they are fully refined. ''I think they intend to do the environmental overlays, eventually,'' she said.

But another panel member, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said, ''I think they want to stall this issue and hope it just goes away.''

Advisory committee members said they were told at the December meeting that the state would map lung cancer first. Lung cancer has a strong environmental link, but it is overwhelmingly to smoking, not the kind of pollution with which the project is concerned.

Ms. Smith insisted that the department had not decided what cancer it would map first, and in fact, might map several types at once.

Breast cancer groups say they will be furious if breast cancer is not among the first mapped, because they were a driving force behind the project and breast cancer, like liver cancer, is suspected of having a strong link to environmental factors.

''This whole project started with us,'' Ms. Pace said. ''If breast cancer isn't included in the first round, they're going to have some explaining to do.''